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Archive for the ‘Computer News’ Category

From the Globe and Mail:

Rev. Lisa Vaughan wants to say a prayer for your BlackBerry.

Or maybe your laptop or any other communication gadget you use.

Rev. Vaughan plans to hold the decidedly contemporary blessing service this Sunday at St. Timothy’s Anglican Church in Hatchet Lake, outside Halifax.

“I think they traditionally used to call it Plough Monday, where people used to bring their farming equipment and tools to the church to be blessed,” said Rev. Vaughan.

“Most of us live with our cellphones and laptops and BlackBerrys and all that kind of stuff. I mean, those are just daily tools for us.”

From the New York Times:

Forget about desperate housewives. To witness true frustration, watch desperate PC users trying to type, send e-mail or work on a spreadsheet, only to be delayed by those pesky hourglass icons for seconds or even minutes until their computers finally respond.

Now Soluto, a company based in Tel Aviv, aims to help these PC owners with an unusual program intended to minimize irritating slowdowns. The software runs in the background on PCs, collecting data on delays in program responses and sending the information to company servers for analysis, said Tomer Dvir, a co-founder and the chief executive.

From the Toronto Star:

Those seconds you spent playing Google’s interactive Pac-Man fed a worldwide productivity drain of 4.82 million hours, an online calculation says.

RescueTime, a software tool to measure how employees spent their time, found that people who clicked through the Google-Pac-Man logo on Friday squandered an average of 36 extra seconds more on google.com, compared with the previous Friday.

The dollar tally was $120,483,000 in lost productivity, RescueTime said Monday. That’s based on an average Google user cost of $25 an hour.

I played it. Did you?

This is old news, but a recent Ripley’s Believe it or Not! cartoon highlighted it for me…

From Reuters:

Internet speed and connectivity in Africa’s largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.

Local news agency SAPA reported the 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km (50 miles) from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

From the New York Times:

…Almost a decade after Google promised that the creed “Don’t be evil” would guide its activities, the federal government is examining Google’s acquisitions and actions as never before, looking for indications that the company’s market power may be anticompetitive in the worlds of Web search and online advertising…

For the last few days, NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten has been reporting on cyber security. It has been a three-part series that started with this:

Americans do not often hear that someone has found a way to overcome U.S. defenses, but military and intelligence officials have been sounding downright alarmist lately with their warnings that the country is ill-prepared to deal with a cyberattack.

I’m a tech guy to begin with, so some of the information being shared seemed pretty simple and basic, but there was some interesting information shared in each piece. Check it out:

• Countries Try To Tame The Wild Territory Of The Net
• Cyberattack: U.S. Unready For Future Face Of War
• Cyber Insecurity: U.S. Struggles To Confront Threat

From the Globe and Mail:

The iPad will not hit U.S. stores until Saturday, but the race to unlock its mysteries started several weeks ago in San Luis Obispo, a picturesque college town roughly 200 miles (320 km) south of Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

On March 12, Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules woke up before dawn. Their plan demanded that they be among the first to get their hands on the device.

So at 5:30 a.m., the minute Apple began taking iPad orders on its website, Wiens and Soules — do-it-yourself repair evangelists and co-founders of a company called iFixit — placed theirs. As delivery addresses, they entered several U.S. locations where their research determined the iPad is likely to arrive soonest. They could tell you which ones, but they would have to kill you.

Armed with heat guns, suction cups and other tools of the trade, the duo will set out on Saturday to reveal some of the tablet’s most closely guarded secrets: the design and components that make it tick.

From the New York Times:

General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.

The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.

But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

From the New York Times:

If that headache plaguing you this morning led you first to a Web search and then to the conclusion that you must have a brain tumor, you may instead be suffering from cyberchondria.

On Monday, Microsoft researchers published the results of a study of health-related Web searches on popular search engines as well as a survey of the company’s employees.

The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.

From ITBusiness.ca:

If you’ve been using Microsoft Word for the past quarter of a century, it can seem like Word has always been the top dog of the word-processing world–and for years, it’s been incorporated into Microsoft’s Office suite. Today, Microsoft’s domination is so complete that, from the public’s point of view, there is almost no “word-processor market.” (Does anyone remember Lotus Manuscript?)

In fact, Microsoft’s word processing program got off to a shaky and awkward start in October 1983, and it didn’t become all-consuming until at least five years later.

Note: The article also includes some nice screenshots and other pictures as well.